This is the 10th in a series recounting close encounters with death by Jamaicans.

THE scars of Mike Henry’s encounter with a political gunman 36 years ago remain to this day.

“Look at this finger,” the veteran politician said, extending his left index finger to reveal an area of sunken skin. “This is a pellet.”

Henry, 76, is the first Jamaican politician to be shot during a general election campaign, an incident that marked a new phase in Jamaican politics and left him pondering his future in the profession in which he made his name.

In an interview with the Jamaica Observer at his central Kingston publishing house last week, he recalled the harrowing incident.

“When I was announcing (candidate) Lloyd Mairs in Clarendon, I can remember clearly someone being on the phone in Four Paths obviously speaking to someone in York Town. Prior to this, in York Town I had perhaps made a mistake of confronting a PNP (People’s National Party) motorcade and making it divert. Of course, you shouldn’t make those kinds of challenges in those days,” Henry said.

“So there were rumours as to what was going to happen. There were rumours as to who was going to be shot. We were on a motorcade moving into York Town and I was heading up the advance team in the motorcade that was making the announcements 15 minutes before Eddie Seaga, Percy Broderick and the others came through,” he continued.

“It got to a point when a stone came over and hit one of the vehicles. Knowing that the leader Seaga and others were following, I wanted to make absolutely sure of what the situation was, so I paused and asked the security to make sure that everything was in place.

“I got out of my vehicle and asked where the stone came from and they pointed toward a house where this gentleman lived. I started to walk there, and to this day, I will never forget. I now know that when you hear a shot, you are safe. Once you hear the shot, you are still alive, but by then I had not been experienced enough being shot, so I didn’t really know,” he said, attempting to make light of the situation.

“I suddenly heard an explosion and felt a sting and saw blood everywhere. The young man beside me, Tidley Watson, whose son Levaughn plays football for Jamaica, was my youth leader. His eye was shot. He later went blind in that eye and there is nothing worse than losing your sight,” said Henry.

The incident left him badly shaken, but the politician pulled through.

Henry, who walks with a limp as a result of the shooting, later lost the election for the then newly created Central Clarendon seat by 884 votes (5,545 – 4,661) to the PNP’s Orville D (OD) Ramtallie. It marked the only time that he lost an election, coming on the heels of eight other victories, making him and another JLP stalwart, Karl Samuda — who once switched allegiance to the PNP — the longest serving members of Parliament.

“I am told I am alive today because the bird season had been cancelled in terms of shooting using the doublebarrelled shotgun, and therefore the penetrative effect of the bullets were not strong enough to have done me greater damage,” Henry told the Sunday Observer.

“Up to now I still have pellets that come out of my body. Why they (doctors) said they didn’t do some operations is that the body repels lead, therefore it pushes it back up. So, since I took the full blast of the doublebarrelled shotgun, I have hundreds of pellets still in my body. You will see me even walk with a limp,” said Henry, who remembers very little from the point of impact to when he found himself on a hospital bed.

“The only thing I heard them (security) say is ‘take the gun and get out of here’. I knew nothing else, except that I woke up in the May Pen Hospital and they had to rush me into Kingston. They didn’t have an ambulance so they had to get the Jamalco ambulance and that guy was driving so fast that I am wondering if I would survive the bullets and then end up dying in an accident. It was my first experience and I didn’t know how serious any of the injuries were.

Henry, who was the transport and works minister in the JLP administration before resigning in November last year, said while the gunman was firing at him, he instinctively placed his hands on the crotch of his pants, invariably to protect his scrotal area.

“After that they brought me into Kingston and I recovered two weeks later. I was incapacitated during that election campaign, so I campaigned in that 1976 election on crutches, because I also had an accident that broke my leg. My theme then was ‘ballots not bullets’,” Henry said.

Henry, the managing director of LMH (Lester Michael Henry) Publishing, started working with the JLP in 1972, prior to the election that saw the PNP, under new leader Michael Manley, ending a two-term run by the labour party. He had been running the largest chain of fast-food restaurants called Mike’s, Home of the Famous Nyamburger, which involved sidewalk dining, a 24-hour service and free newspapers on Sundays, among other things.

The success of the food chain prompted a suggestion from his close friend Derrick Mahfood that he enter elective politics. He took Mahfood up, but lost out in a race for the Central St Catherine constituency by two votes in an election held in Tivoli Gardens.

“When I went to Spanish Town it was Abe Dabdoub who was supposed to be leading the charge for the JLP.

“It turned out that Granville Williams was there trying to challenge for the seat. In the run-up it became pretty volatile and that was the first selection process that was not held in a constituency. They moved it to Tivoli and a branch was established overnight and I lost by two votes,” he said.

Trouble started brewing too when he formed the Dockers and Marine Workers Union with pal Scully Scott, which soon resulted in the unionising of most of the banana workers at Oracabessa in the heart of PNP territory in Western St Mary. But politics was his scene and Henry stepped up the pace in a bid to get elected.

Soon after, the Beckford & Smith — now St Jago High School — past student, who holds the distinction of leading the school to its first Sunlight Cup cricket title when he captained the team during the 1950s, headed to Clarendon where his family roots were entrenched, following prompting from JLP top notches Percy Broderick and Bruce Golding.

Taking on the large Central Clarendon seat had huge geographical challenges. Differences in political ideology didn’t make things any easier for Henry either, as he experienced other violent acts that often characterised political campaigning.

“I rented Ms Gatty’s house in Mocho, but the house was set on fire and partially burnt one night. The bedroom that I used to sleep in was sprayed with M16 bullets. The only reason I wasn’t at home that night was when I got to Four Paths, somebody told me that it wouldn’t be wise to bother to go home tonight as there were so many activities around,” Henry stated.

Describing the kind of politics that marked the 1976 election campaign as “confrontational”, Henry’s emotion showed when he reflected on the slaughter one night when nine people were shot dead and 26 houses burnt to the ground during a motorcade in May Pen, the Clarendon capital, as then PNP president and prime minister Michael Manley’s team passed through Western Park.

“In fact, we had a mass funeral for the people three weeks later. That was sad. I also saw my publishing business burnt to the ground in Kingston and political signs put up,” he said.

More agony was in store for Henry that year when one of his children was incarcerated during the controversial state of emergency.

There were even diplomatic challenges as Henry and Armando Ulises Estrada firebrand Cuban ambassador to Jamaica at the time, and Henry’s neighbour at Millsborough Avenue in Barbican, St Andrew, squared off on a few occasions. Estrada, who is retired and now lives in Havana, was expelled by the JLP government weeks after it took office in October 1980 and Jamaica chopped diplomatic relations with Cuba a year later as a result of the frosty relationship at the time.

“I had lived in front of Estrada, and my wife, family and I, faced a lot of issues. Estrada objected to one fundraising venture that I had at my house, so he came out of his home onto the street to say that my noise was disturbing him.

“On my side we had a lot of guests and two of them were Edward Seaga and Hugh Shearer. I went into the street, Estrada and I exchanged issues, almost physically and then the next thing I know is all the JDF tanks surrounded my house at Millsborough. Nobody could leave or enter the party.

“I had Mr Seaga and Mr Shearer in my bedroom and they had to call Dudley Thompson (former minister of national security), who came and spoke to Estrada, then came and spoke to me while the tanks were at the foot of the road.

“In the lead-up to the 1976 election I had to confront the army too, because of the way politics went then and we still have a little bit of it left, is [their belief] that you go in and wipe out an area. Tivoli faces those challenges today,” Henry said.

The former minister has also had his house raided by the security forces multiple times.

“I had my house raided several times. The army surrounded my house leading up to the 1980 election and rumours flew that they were going to lock me up for all of the various issues that people try to say politicians are involved in.

“I remember Mr Maurice Azan was one of my campaign managers, and I remember he and I driving to my home, because I got a call from my then wife Camille that my house was surrounded by soldiers — tanks and machine guns around the house. When we drove up to the house, they pulled out Maurice, a gentleman of high repute, physically, out of the van. They had acetylene torches cutting off my door,” Henry said.

Later, Henry came under pressure when he dared to challenge Seaga for the leadership of the JLP during the tumultuous 1990s. He was defeated, but the threats and name-calling at the National Arena revealed signs of glaring discomfort from factions in the JLP camp.

“In challenging Eddie Seaga for the leadership, it was expected that you would be threatened in the sense of the strength of Tivoli, but that didn’t deter me, because I felt challenges should not be made surreptitiously, they shouldn’t be made through gangs, groups or organisations. The way they set up things showed me that I couldn’t get the number of votes that were necessary. I always feel threatened by politics,” said Henry, who alleged that although the rules were that neither he nor Seaga should have entered the arena until the voting was over, the former prime minister was allowed in.

“I felt that the structure of the JLP needed to be democratically challenged, but I equally felt that it was time for us to re-look and recharge ourselves with new leadership,” said Henry in reflection.

“I had made my message very clear, that I had enough will of the people behind me, in Central Clarendon, that if indeed it meant confrontation, let’s have the confrontation,” he added.

Henry was the last nationally elected deputy leader of the JLP, pre-dating the current system where there four regional deputies.

“I was not supposed to be elected a deputy leader at the time but I became one with the highest number of votes when I challenged for deputy leader,” he told the Sunday Observer.